It wasn’t only a must-win game for the Lakers Thursday. It was a must-look-good game.

Well, they got the second part right.

For half the game, the Lakers played so beautifully and outplayed the Boston Celtics so thoroughly that they actually looked like a team that could win these NBA Finals.

What painful irony that the night the Lakers put their best feet forward at last turned into perhaps their most embarrassing stumble since the early years of their Celtics rivalry.

After leading by as many as 24 points and giving 18,997 fans at Staples Center visions of both a series tie and the momentum, the Lakers were slowly overwhelmed by the Celtics and their own nerves, and lost, 97-91, to fall behind, 3-1, in the best-of-7 championship.

The Lakers aren’t gone, but they’re going. No team in NBA Finals history has come back from 3-1 to win the title.

What could Lakers coach Phil Jackson say? Except that one good comeback deserves another.

“Well, it’s not over,” Jackson said. “This is not over. The series is not over.”

The Celtics took their first lead at 84-83, with a few ticks over 4 minutes left. They put the game away at 96-91 when veteran Ray Allen drove cleanly past young Sasha Vujacic for a layup with 16.4 seconds to go.

Staples Center went silent. If it’s any consolation, the purple-and-gold crowd can say it witnessed another indelible chapter in Lakers-Celtics history.

The Lakers had won the previous must-win game, 87-81, on Tuesday, but it was such a grind throughout, fans left Staples that night wondering if more performances like that would be good enough. Lakers players had hoped to find better efforts inside them.

They went into Thursday with so many questions to answer before anybody could call this series a match:

Could the Lakers get Lamar Odom going? Could they get the ball inside against the league’s tightest defense? Could they keep Celtics stars Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett down?

Could they, just once in this hotly anticipated first NBA Finals in 21 years between the league’s two greatest franchises in 21 years, make an argument that the Celtics aren’t simply a better team?

They answered a glib “yes” to all questions before the last notes of Jeffrey Osborne’s “Star-Spangled Banner” faded. Even though Kobe Bryant didn’t make a basket in the first half, the Lakers sprinted to leads of 20-6, 35-14 after a quarter (an NBA Finals record), and 45-21 in the second period before the Celtics began to chip away.

The evening had begun with what might be a first: The NBA commissioner calling a press conference that ran to within minutes of tip-off to proclaim that the league doesn’t fix games. This was David Stern’s first official press conference to address disgraced former referee Tim Donaghy’s claim that the result of a game in the 2002 Lakers-

Sacramento Kings playoff series was manipulated.

“On behalf of my officials,” Stern said, “I’d like to tell you that they do not engage in the criminal conduct of which Mr. Donaghy has accused them.”

No officiating controversy in this game, although Celtics coach Doc Rivers did draw a technical foul for complaining that Bryant should have been called for a foul when he stole a pass out of Garnett’s hands in the first quarter. The Lakers drew most of the fouls, but they earned them by slashing to the basket.

Especially Odom, who’d been the Lakers’ biggest disappointment. Odom drove for a lay-in on the game’s first play, then used a dunk (with a Vladimir Radmanovic pass), a baseline drive and a cut to the hoop to quickly build the L.A. lead to 10 – and growing.

The Lakers were up, 58-40, at halftime. Of course, they also knew that every game of the series had gone down to the final minutes.

Or, as Jackson was to tell a network interviewer between the third and fourth quarters: “Momentum’s a strange girl.”

By the fourth quarter, the Lakers’ lead was down to two points after the Celtics’ 21-3 run. Eddie House and James Posey were joining Allen in making big shots from outside, while the Lakers’ marksmen were missing.

The worst was yet to come, the fourth quarter seeing Bryant make four of eight shots but the rest of the Lakers go 4-for-13, including 0-for-4 by Vujacic, who’d been Tuesday’s surprise hero. The Celtics scored 20 points in the last 5<MD+,%30,%55,%70>1/<MD-,%0,%55,%70>2 minutes, when neither Bryant (17 points, on 6-for-19 shooting, with 10 assists) nor Odom (19 points, 10 rebounds) managed a basket.

The Lakers are stunned right now. They face the nearly impossible task of winning three in a row, Sunday at Staples and then Tuesday and Thursday at Boston.

The games are all absolutely must-wins now. Looking good counts for even less than it did in Game 4 – when it turned out to mean absolutely nothing.

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